11/05/2008 @ 12:30PM

Morning-After Pride

I am watching the sun rise over Lake Michigan in the land of Lincoln on this new day in America. This is the morning after a great divide in the biography of the United States. As a nation, we have come of age.

I flew to Chicago on Tuesday afternoon to witness history as the United States of America went to the polls on Election Day, 2008. Hours later, as President-Elect Barack Obama spoke in Grant Park to claim his victory before a great throng of supporters and an eagerly listening world–almost exactly 40 years after the chaos of 1968–I felt myself in the flow of time, a minor participant in a great saga punctuated by events that shaped my life, as it shaped the lives of so many others.

The year 1968 was, for me and most of my friends, a year of tragedy and disillusion. Through the years that followed, years punctuated by Watergate and Vietnam and by decades of political polarization and paralysis, politics was the game that disappointed. Yesterday it was the game that delivered. The work of governing lies ahead, but the sun is rising and the challenges we face–in reconstructing a broken economy, restoring a threatened constitution, ending a misguided war and waging a necessary one, starting to heal a wounded planet–look from here like opportunities to be seized, not obstacles to be feared.

How different this feels from the crazy election of 2000, brought to an abrupt and puzzling end by the Supreme Court’s ill-starred decision to stop counting the ballots, when another new president was installed to preside over a nearly dysfunctional country. Having served as counsel before the court to the losing candidate during that sad chapter in our democratic trajectory, I returned to ordinary life but wondered when, if ever, I could fully believe in the process again.

As the decade progressed, the most impressive student I had ever taught was quietly pursuing his own political trajectory. In 1989, I had met Barack Obama and hired him as my research assistant while he was still just a first-year Harvard law student. His stunning combination of analytical brilliance and personal charisma, openness and maturity, vision and pragmatism, was unmistakable from my very first encounter with the future president.

I thought about that encounter as he and his wife Michelle each gave me a hug in one of the off-stage tents in Grant Park last night. I recalled it as I found myself unable to express in words my sense of gratitude and of possibility. The president-elect and the first lady-designate both thanked me for the part I had played in Barack Obama’s education and his rise to power, but it was I, of course, who owed thanks to them, thanks for the journey on which they had embarked to reclaim America for all who dare to hope.

There will be countless efforts to dissect their improbable path from that cold winter morning in Springfield, Ill., nearly two years ago–when a still-new senator from Illinois announced his candidacy for the highest office in the land–to the unseasonably warm evening in Chicago when that quest reached its climax and when those who had led it confronted the daunting challenges of actually governing. This is not another attempt at such dissection. Nor is this another post-mortem on the failed efforts of president-elect Obama’s more than formidable foes. It is simply a personal note to commemorate a milestone in a great nation’s history.

As an immigrant to the United States, born in Shanghai to Russian Jewish parents who brought me with them when they settled in California in 1947, I have always felt great pride–both in that ancestry and in the gift of citizenship conferred on me by the nation that went on to provide me with such extraordinary opportunities–to thrive and to give something back for all that I have been given. My pride in that citizenship has never been greater than it is today. Truth to tell, I find myself unable to stop smiling, just as last night I found it difficult to stop crying.

Barack Obama’s unique ability to explain and to motivate, coupled with his signature ability to listen and to learn, and linked with the calm that marked his nearly flawless campaign, will serve him–and all of us–well as we grapple with as daunting a set of problems as the nation has faced in three-quarters of a century. It is of course true that only time will tell just how successful this brave, brilliant and caring man will be in charting a new course for the country, something that will depend only partly on decisions that Obama will make as president.

But one thing is already certain: The very fact of Barack Obama’s election at this defining moment–quite apart from the programs he pursues and the ways in which he pursues them–already speaks volumes to everyone on the planet. His election in and of itself displays how dramatically America has moved to transcend the divisions of its past and bids fair to give us a new lease on life in a world that had come, and not without reason, to see us in an awful light–a world that will now give this nation a fresh look and a second chance.

The sun is now high over Lake Michigan. It is a new day in America. We can do this. Yes, we can.

Laurence H. Tribe is the Carl M. Loeb university professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard.